[Footnote A: It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind exhibits unusual activity. But the argument moves in the opposite direction. For of what sort is this unusual activity? That which results from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary glimmerings of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same purpose.] Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was increased by opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured Coleridge's poetic faculties; which probably was the case, since in genuine poetry the mind is prominently realistic, its motions are all outward, and therefore excessive indolence must of necessity be fatal. De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to opium: it demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No temptation so strong _could_ have been presented to Coleridge. De Quincey really craved the drug. His stomach was deranged, and was still suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London. It seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller, just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his left leg.